You don’t have to be smitten by Johnny Depp to adore pirates.
Over the years, fleet after fleet of academic-press books about those fabled rogues have suggested that the imaginations of professors, too, may away to the high seas.
Indeed, the academic pirate book has a long history, with such high points as Philip Gosse’s 1932 classic, The History of Piracy.
Pirates draw scholarly attention because, while they were often pests with scurvy and missing limbs, they helped to shape the modern economic, political, and social world—particularly during the great age of exploration and empire building.
Jon Latimer, in his Buccaneers of the Caribbean: How Piracy Forged an Empire (Harvard University Press), describes marauders who roamed the Caribbean with an unusual mission. The Welsh independent scholar (who died this year) relates that these buccaneers (so named because they ate dried feral-cattle and -pig meat that Taino Indians called boucan) were the shock troops of burgeoning empires. Seventeenth-century monarchs of England, Holland, and France issued them permits to loot Spanish treasure ships and to terrorize settler and native populations on land.
Already as adept in plundering as in smuggling tobacco, spices, pearls, hides, and other prizes of the West Indies, the buccaneers seized as much Spanish silver and other treasures as they could, took a generous cut, and shipped the rest to European royals. Under these depredations, Spain struggled to maintain its faraway colonial holdings; this hastened its demise as the century’s superpower.
The “brethren of the coast” operated so successfully, writes Latimer, that they shaped competition for control of the New World and fueled the Industrial Revolution back in Europe.
But, in Latimer’s telling of the history, all the fighting among the rising powers wasted so much manpower, resources, and energy that a more reasoned approach would have been to agree, upfront, to share the riches of the colonies. Settlers could hardly establish beachheads of empire when constantly routed by one power or another.
Once European rulers realized that trade was a far more effective means of building empires (and could be done on the backs of native populations and slaves), they outlawed privateering and crushed it viciously. “They went from encouragement or connivance of buccaneering to disapproval and outright antagonism,” Latimer writes. The buccaneers soon packed up their sabers, parrots, peg legs, and Jolly Rogers—an inspired cautionary trademark—and hightailed it.
Not for long. Soon the skull and crossbones flapped over the Caribbean again. And, during the next phase of pirate history, from the late 17th and early 18th centuries, pirates boasted a striking, avant-garde model of economic activity, writes Peter T. Leeson in The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates (Princeton University Press).
In the pirate workplace, shipmates voted officers in and out, writes Leeson, an assistant professor of the study of capitalism at George Mason University and a visiting professor of economics at the University of Chicago. On a pirate ship, such separation of powers also required captains to relinquish some decision making to quartermasters.
One hundred years later, James Madison, architect of the U.S. Constitution, outlined in his Federalist Papers the thorny issue of “the paradox of power"—that rulers strong enough to refrain from tyranny were also strong enough to indulge it—and a solution: democracy.
Per constitutions that crew members signed before setting sail, each pirate became an owner-employee of the expedition. Crewmen each received one equal share of booty; officers were limited to two. Lest that flat pay scale encourage shirking, the freebooters adopted bonuses and perks, such as workers’ compensation. Payouts depended on the injuries sustained in the inherently hazardous trade.
Measures to improve safety and efficiency in the workplace included restrictions on when and where crewman could drink, and on smoking below deck. Pirate ships were, after all, loaded with gunpowder.
Conditions on pirate ships were often so much better than those on merchant ships that pirates had little trouble recruiting sailors from legal, hierarchical vessels, where floggings could be arbitrary and fierce.
Leeson notes, however, that pirates’ work rules did not make them proto socialists, but merely rational economic actors. Their code was shaped by an “invisible hook,” in Leeson’s play on Adam Smith’s notion of the “invisible hand” that guides Homo economicus to self-interestedly embrace money, greed, and cost containment.
Leeson’s book forms, in fact, part of his larger study of the economics of anarchy: How do people get along when governments are not in place to manage social cooperation? He notes that the absence of external authorities and investors shaped the pirate code.
In seeking to optimize their profits—weighing bounties against the likelihood of dancing at the end of a rope—pirates mastered public relations. Consider their swashbuckling monikers, at once captivating and forbidding: freebooters, corsairs, privateers, brethren of the coast, sea rovers, sea dogs, buccaneers.
But nothing shored up the operation of the invisible hook like the iron fist. To encourage surrender and avoid perilous fighting, pirates installed a canny system of horrid tortures. If crew members of captured ships did not fess up about where booty was stashed on board, or about the sailing times of future shipments, they might be subjected to, say, “the Sweat.” Its victims were forced to run between an inner ring of flames and an outer gantlet of pirates slashing at their behinds with sharp, pointy objects.
“Woolding” was—well, you don’t want to know.
The pirates’ reasoning was elegant: They wished word to spread that the best policy, once captured, was to squeal before being made to scream. (Hollywood notwithstanding, no one was forced to walk any plank; after all, how much could you get out of a man bisected by sharks?)
Do modern-day plunderers off the Horn of Africa and in the Strait of Malacca resemble pirates of that era? Well, says Leeson in an interview, Somali pirates, too, have displayed business savvy. They measure their risk, avoid killing. And they learn how to negotiate, in workshops on shore. “I don’t know how widespread that is,” he says, “but it would be a lucrative procedure if you were planning on being involved in piracy on a long-term basis.”
Leeson’s qualifications for writing and speaking about pirates, by the way, include that he still owns the silver skull ring with ruby eyes that his parents bought him at the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyworld when he was 8 years old. He also has a tattoo, although not a piratical one: His, on one bicep, is of a supply-and-demand curve.
Centuries before they curdled blood about the Caribbean, pirates had earned the name “enemies of all.” That gives the title to Daniel Heller-Roazen’s book, The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations (Zone Books). How, asks the professor of comparative literature at Princeton University, did pirates come to occupy this distinctive status of vilification in Western jurisprudence and polity?
It all began with Cicero, says Heller-Roazen in his philosophical, political, legal, and genealogical study. The great Roman orator noted that while a lawful state might wage war and sign treaties with “just” enemies, who were nominally equals, the pirate was “the common enemy of all,” an “unjust antagonist unworthy of such rights.”
In later centuries, jurists bumped up the pirate to the status of “enemy of the human species” and “the enemy of humanity.” Ouch!
The legal and philosophical evolution of the concept has a strange and chilling consequence, says Heller-Roazen: It obliges all nonpirates to wage endless war against these outsiders.
As the concept was eventually instated in international law and the political philosophy of modern Europe and its former colonies, Heller-Roazen explains, governments repeatedly concluded that an enemy-of-all merited the severest, sustained military and security response.
According to Cicero, Heller-Roazen says, that meant dealing with a common enemy by acting “exactly as he does: faithlessly.” But the commandment to essentially abandon the domain of moral and legal imperatives created a paradox: “One becomes a pirate oneself.”
That troubling contradiction has persisted in Western jurisprudence relating to pirates, Heller-Roazen says. For example, late in the 18th century, Immanuel Kant, as part of his schema for “eternal peace,” advised states to protect themselves from bad actors by forming a “league of nations.” Its members’ rights should include the right to wage war if violated or merely threatened, and then to pursue it with unlimited intensity but not of unlimited kind—only with the purpose of winning a lasting peace.
But Kant, like Cicero, made an exception when the foe was the pirate, the unlawful combatant, the enemy of all. Then, no holds should be barred.
Heller-Roazen reasons that, because such enemies or potential enemies are never absent, Kant’s dictate was, in effect, “that the project for eternal peace be, in truth, a project for the perpetual preparation for peace through war.”
Given the duration of that theory and rhetoric of the pirate-as-enemy-combatant, it is no wonder that the terrorist has now become a crucial contemporary figure, the latest “enemy of all,” Heller-Roazen says in an interview: “The historical model for the way in which we think about terrorists can be found in the way pirates and privateers were thought of for centuries.”
It was that perception that prompted him to write his book, he says. That, and the irony that Western states increasingly turn to privateers to pursue terrorists. “For me, the interest in piracy was very much related to all that.”
